Permanent Balance discussion: Everything edition

As a result of THIS and THIS getting a little derailed about balance of weapons and other stuff, I thought I’d follow up on the suggesting by @Perteks to have a different thread solely for the in-depth debate in the Lounge of …the balance of everything.

Continuing from…

Axe and Falcion are a cheesy weapon and “bad” choice as they are so completely overpowered compared to pretty much everything. Elf weapons are completely OP too. Shade needs nerf to stab damage +ult and IB is too tanky.

Yikes.

[edit] It’d be nice of some official type person could split the posts from the other topics and put them here?

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Ok, well here’s a few problems with certain talents.

  1. Foot Knights second row of talents are pretty bad and should be replaced wih more useful talents. I think most will agree with this.

  2. All of the 50% damage reduction while being the last hero standing talents should be replaced with generic 25% health boosting talents, at least that would be helpful.

  3. The 25% less weapon spread talents should also increase ranged damage by 10%, so weapons that are already very accurate get more of a benefit from them, while shotguns would receive the most benefit.

I can probably think of more talent issues, but that’ll do for now.

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Can I talk about the absolutely horrid balance presented in Garfield Kart?

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I think you may have opened a Pandora’s box here…

There are a lot of things still in imbalance in this game, and some won’t find agreement about them among the players. Personally, I think the worst offenders are several Talents, Axe and Falchion, Zealot, and Shields, roughly in that order. Every one of them has been discussed more in-depth before, and those discussions still apply, so I won’t write a wall of text this time.

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Difficulty

Since this is a balance everything discussion I’m going to concern myself solely to the upcomming difficulty since Legend is and will be beyond any help soon.

It would be nice if we could gain back a bit of the survival trill of V1. To achieve this you just have to majorly tune down combat temp hp gen.
Doing this will improve the game in many aspects:
It will make the game massively harder without hp sponging or insane spamming necessary, It will give a major boost in viability to defensive and cc weapons while still having very viable mobility builds and it will provide much benefit to team play.

Ideally I would suggest to remove temp combat hp gen across the game and replace talent row 20 with something else but it’s not gonna happen at this point people got used to it. So the most I can hope for is that the next difficulty will be a good one.
To be clear the temp hp game play isn’t a bad thing per se as it really fits careers like Zealot and Slayer that are maniacs that live to die in battle but on the rest it doesn’t and it has completely stripped away all restraints on really skilled people, turning it into a rush and killing competition, which is not what should be a thing on the highest difficulty showing just how abusable it is.
This is by far not the end of all arguments against it but let me sub up with this:

No good, balanced and fun difficulty will succeed without tuning temp hp.


Weapons

Axe & Falch
I agree that Axe & Falch is way to good but it doesn’t stop there Dual Hammers also outclass other weapons.
Suggested solution: Rework alike S&D meaning every attack has lower dmg than an attack of the 1h version would PERIOD or making them locked to one career like slayers dual axes. This must come at the expense of the career dough like having no ranged.

Elf weapons
Are generally too good almost across the board compared to the average of other characters.
Generally speaking they are more mobile and have undeserved crit chance bonuses that heavily broke the game until the traits were fixed just so the elf wasn’t op and arguably still are 100% undeserved grantig the entirety of other build specialization by default.


Shade
Shade needs major tweaks to her ult. First nerf but also equalize ult dmg (for diversity) then nerf again but allow it’s bonus dmg to actually be boosted by the backstab passive (to reward good play). It would also be possible to move the bonus dmg to a place that ignores most of the possible modifiers to not make it weak by default or op beyond comparison as it is now. It needs to be said that loading up barrage, bombs etc. are skilled play and not getting a bonus could be weird as well. The property of crit power can be removed from the game without issues dough.


There’s more but I got lazy.

Has there even been talk of a balance pass as part of WoM or is it something we’re all just assuming will happen?

dual wield weapons are OP purely because they have made their 1h counterparts obsolete, and (my personal opinion) powerful weapons obtained through DLC means increased sales of said DLC.

Considering the difficulty, the THP generation is the underlying cause of some careers being YOLO through the level. Merc and Zealot are the obvious examples, but I think THP is a mechanic that works when you have to be good to generate it. BH keeping up his THP by taking big risks and attacking SV in melee is a good example of where it THP is done right, and BW can generate good THP in the right hands. Merc can generate good THP with Left Click spam and this is where the balance gets broken.

I really really want shields to be good and hanker for the killing blow from VT1 that made Kruber with a Shield a great choice.

4 Likes

Most of talents need rework a lot of classes have braindead picks, I would say Mercenary is perfectly balanced in term of talents and he should be example of how to make talents.

Like 50% resist dmg should be working similar to gromlir, its half the damage and going on cooldown, and in that way its have nice combo with barkskin. Otherwise its still gonna be better pick than dmg resist on stacks

Most of 2hd weapons are very hard to use because of slowing effect on attack, you can counter it by cheesing with block canceling but thats not fun at all, I would suggest to lower it drastically (comparing that some weapons even give you speedboost its just stupid)

Granted it could be that they tried to sneakily list WoM mode twice but that’s something I would not accept.


Couldn’t agree more with what you said even about temp hp.
I just want to add that I personally don’t think it will ever be balanced well and every other added and tweaked weapon might still go off all rails with it. That’s majorly why I prefer non over some.

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Yea, increased difficulty. But they also said they were increasing the level cap, what ever that means? Could mean an increase in Hero Power or New talents, which would end up making any harder than Legend difficulty basically the new legend. Hopefully they are just implementing the “Show True level mod” and it will simply show peoples actual levels with no boost. Although, I wouldn’t mind a more MMO/RPG approach with each expansion adding a higher lvl cap and stronger weapons and stuff to grind for. It would keep the game fresh. The new difficulty would need to be properly balanced though so you don’t end up with just a new legend once you get the weapons as I said before.

As for the current balance,

I’d say nerf the shades bonuses on ULT, like barrage, crit power, shrapnel, WHC tag, etc. Give it a set damage and leave it at that.

Now for Zealot, stop the bonus 30% damage from working with ranged weapons. Also, nerf the A&F down to Elf S&D levels. That’s enough to at least stop it from one shotting every single horde mob and 2 shotting everything else. It would also make other weapons viable again on all his careers.

Here’s the A&F Heavy Attacks,

Zealot%20heavy

And here’s the Elfs S&D second heavy, which is the same as the Dual daggers damage, aka the boss killing weapon.

Elf%20heavy%202nd

The A&F ends up being able to get the attacks off faster since the elf has to transition to the 2nd heavy each time. Which ends up with the Zealot dealing way more damage. Now throw 30% more damage on top of that from zealot passive. This is where the issue is… Same thing happens with infantry as well, you end up dealing 5,120‬ damage per heavy strike with my build for chaos mobs, which have the most HP. For comparison, the strongest horde mob which is a chaos raider has 3,900HP. Even with light attacks, the push attack transitions into 2 light horizontal cleaves. It’s more than enough to kill any group of horde mobs in front of you. Now top that off with very high stagger and you can CC a horde and just stack temp HP.

I wasn’t too aware of the whole premise of the new difficulty and I am now a bit worried that it’s going to just be another ten levels of power creep/grind to get to max level again.

Exactly how are they going to make it more difficulty without using the already-in-action methods? By this I mean the deeds + twitch or the Weekly event + twitch is already using;

Masses of armour
Loads of special spawns
up to 4 bosses at once (that I’ve fought, probably could be more if you take your time?)
Constant hordes
Blood loss and other bad effects
no ammo etc

And people are blasting through these supposedly hardcore modes with their regular groups. I’ve got something like 22 dice out of a run before due to Boss spawns so what are FS going to do?

So where do they go to make it more difficult without just spamming units until your GFX card or Entire PC overheats? In-game nerfs - like reducing cleave or stagger or making everyones HP between 40 and 80? Massively increase Friendly Fire Damage? Chaos warriors that slap you around like a Giant from Game of Thrones?

I’m quite worried now it’s just going to be more of the same for another ten levels until we get to max stat weapons at the new level cap… and start doing darkness blindfold legend runs with a balloon on a stick and a HP of 1.

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Good question, and since this is vermintide, spamming more enemies at a given moment doesn’t necessary mean that it will make the game harder. More clever and/or less forgiving enemies on the other hand could raise the difficulty. If they narrow the dodge and block window and raise the overall damage output of enemies by some %, the game could become much harder.

I think narrowing the dodge window might end up back with ice skating CW up flights of stairs again. I’d rather see something like a Shaman casting buff spells on their own units, or casting a cloud of flies on themselves that means they are harder to hit at ranged. Even enemies that knock you over (like we do to the CW) could be better than patrols of 25+ CW. Something as simple as teleporting a player a little distance away might liven things up.

Well, I’m following this logic:

What’s hard and takes skill in this game? Some of the answers would be dodging/blocking or simply avoiding taking damage. How can you make it harder?

But, at the end of the day, no matter how hard this game gets, people will overcome it and say it’s easy. I consider myself an above average player. I will never be really good simply because I don’t play that often. For me, the difficulty in this game is ok and sometimes easy when I play with really skillful players. But it instantly becomes hard when I play with less experienced players and that’s the reason why I like to play with randoms.

One possible solution would be an asymmetric versus mode in which players would take control over monsters or some elite enemies. That would certainly raise up the difficulty.

No

Currently there are mechanics that allow for such a thing. Broken builds also do not help. I’m quite certain that with the right tweaks nobody will say it’s easy. Some might say that they do it very reliable but if you narrow/remove the dodge window, remove temp hp, make many elites uninterruptible, step up those events and maybe make all monsters attack a bit faster I won’t say it’s easy.

FK pasive ‘No Guts, No Glory’ should be buff from 10 to 20%

then he would be better than gromlir

Gromlir take 100% first hit and after that, you have Dwarf-forged which reduce 30%. How is gonna be better? FK reduction will be 35% (no guts, no glory + protective presence 15%) and without the free first hit. That is not the same…
well, now I thinking, no guts no glory should be 25%, FK have a full armor :wink:

I actually think Kruber could do with a slight buff to some of the damage output on some of his weapons, but poor dodge and slow hitting weapons on FK are more of a problem. Increasing his damage resist is putting a little band-aid over the bigger issue.

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I generally lump balance issues into a few categories.

Weapons - I mostly think Axe and Falchion and Dual Hammers as being OP, and Shield weapons need buffs. For the first two; I think reduce the damage a bit, and for the second I’d . . . well, maybe reduce cleave some. They fall off hard in modded difficulties, as it is. Shield weapons mostly just need slightly better mobility - not great, but like 2 effective dodges and a x1 multiplier. As it is, they are NOT good defensively, because blocking isn’t a good defensive strategy, and they’re arguably the most dangerous weapons against monsters because dodging their attacks is so difficult to do consistently. Also, I don’t know why things like the 1-Handed Swords don’t all have 6 dodges.

Talents - There are a few that stick out for me - the 50% damage reduction ones for Slayer and Zealot, and Handmaiden’s 3-second invis after Dash. I’d just maybe make the first two have a lesser reduction (35%? I dunno), or make them baked-into the class, because unless they’re awful then they’re still always going to be auto-picks. For Handmaiden, firstly - we need Bladedancer to work, though it might be stupidly overpowered - we need to at least able to use it and have it do SOMETHING. The 3-second invis could just break on attacking, which seems fair. Also, maybe tweak WHC’s level 25 talents. Almost no one ever takes anything but cooldown reduction, because the other two options are so weak.

Foot Knight - he just needs some buffs. Honestly, I feel like he should have the extra cleave, rather than Merc. Merc gets attack speed, and ways to buff his power in combat, and is the only medic - it’d be fair to cut his power down a bit and give it to FK.

Temp Health - I think the idea is good, but it needs to be a bit more limited, because it just trivializes the content so hard. Maybe its decay could ramp up over time, so you can’t just build it up and sit on it all game. Or the amounts you can get could be clipped. Maybe an internal cooldown?

Regarding a new difficulty, I would personally like to see some of the mutators incorporated; like, occasionally enemies do a Tzeentch split, but not every time - it means you’ll just have to be on-guard for when it does happen. Have suicide Skaven mixed into the regular game. Enemy health and spawns could be increased some, but depending on that alone won’t be too much fun, IMO. I do like how things like Onslaught add more shielded enemies, so you have to think about how best to take them down and can’t just spam left-click into hordes mindlessly.

I also think new enemies with features that counter some of our most commonly-used tactics would do a lot to increase difficulty. Standardbearers might be good for that, when WoM arrives. We’ll have to see.

Add chain leaping slayers and shade boss damage to that list.

Honestly slayer is seriously strong. I am of the opinion that zealot is easy to do well with, for sure, downplaying isn’t my intent since he in a sense gets the best of both worlds - able to take a lot of hits and do lots of damage back. But if slayer is to remain as is, I see no problem with zealot axe/falch or shade really.

Now it doesn’t seem unlikely there are a lot of different opinions as to what is the ideal balancing, but any serious balancing patch is probably just on the horizon with beastmen in the works. (pure speculation) And besides, that’ll bring some new goodies into the uh… blender.

http://media1.gameinformer.com/filestorage/CommunityServer.Components.SiteFiles/imagefeed/featured/kyleblog/chestopening/newgodofwar.gif
appropriate? :smiley:

I often find myself wanting to use the one handed axe on Kruber mercenary, really because of just that.